Five years ago, Gov. Sam Brownback made Kansas an economic laboratory for the nation by aggressively cutting taxes. He's expected to leave office with his Kansas reputation in tatters and his home state an example of trickle-down economics that didn't work.

The White House on Wednesday announced that President Donald Trump plans to nominate Brownback to serve as ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. If confirmed by the Senate, he'll run the State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom.

Advertisement

Brownback tweeted, "Religious Freedom is the first freedom. The choice of what you do with your own soul. I am honored to serve such an important cause. -SDB"

Officials in Kansas expect Brownback to step down as governor, but his office would not immediately discuss future plans Wednesday evening.

Brownback, 60, would also leave a Kansas legacy of far tougher restrictions on abortion and fewer limits on gun owners than when he won the first of his two terms in 2010. Brownback refused to expand the Medicaid health program for the poor in line with former President Barack Obama's signature health care law even as several other Republican governors went ahead.

Brownback will be most remembered for championing cuts in Kansas personal income taxes starting in 2012. The state was supposed to get a "shot of adrenaline to the heart" of its economy.

He described it as a state-level experiment that would demonstrate the benefits of tax-cutting theory that dates back to Ronald Reagan's administration, with Kansas even hiring Reagan economist Arthur Laffer to provide advice and promote the results. Cutting taxes — in particular for business owners — would spur hiring, creating wealth that would trickle down to everyone.

It's still GOP orthodoxy, and Trump has set similar tax cutting goals. But in Kansas, the cuts failed to deliver the economic growth the governor had promised.

With the state's economy struggling, Brownback won re-election with less than 50 percent of the vote in 2014 by suggesting the state could have it all. Kansas could keep his core income tax cuts without sacrificing spending on schools or social services.

Instead, the state muddled along with temporary budget patches, raiding highway funds, shorting public pensions and then boosting sales and cigarette taxes.

Fellow Republicans across the nation watched the Kansas experiment closely and were not impressed. GOP lawmakers in Missouri enacted tax cuts but went slower and tied them to growth in tax revenues. In South Carolina, an unsuccessful pitch for tax cuts prompted then-Gov. Nikki Haley to say, "We are not doing what Kansas did."

Trump carried Kansas easily in 2016, but voters turned on Brownback and his allies, ousting two dozen of his conservative allies from the Legislature and giving Democrats and GOP moderates more power.

The Kansas Legislature repudiated Brownback's program in June, rolling back most of those past tax cuts, raising rates and ending an exemption for more than 330,000 farmers and business owners to raise $1.2 billion over two years. Brownback vetoed their bill, and they overrode his action.

It was a far cry from the promise of his first term.

He won the governor's office in 2010 as a U.S. senator on a wave of voter frustration in ruby red Kansas with Obama and other Democrats in Washington, aided by the rise of the tea party movement. Brownback won 63 percent of the vote and Republicans swept all statewide and congressional races on the ballot.

Brownback grew up on a family farm in eastern Kansas, trained as lawyer and was the state's agriculture secretary from 1986 to 1993, taking a year off to serve as a White House fellow. He was elected to the U.S. House in 1994, part of the so-called Republican revolution that gave the GOP control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years.

Two years later, he won election to the Senate, capturing the seat held by Bob Dole, who'd resigned to run for president. Brownback won a full six-year term in 1998 and another in 2004.

Brownback has long been a favorite of Christian conservatives for his strong stances as a U.S. senator against abortion and same-sex marriage. He also gained some attention as a vocal critic of the entertainment industry.

He started running in 2007 for the Republican presidential nomination but dropped out before primaries and caucuses began in 2008.

Brownback converted to Catholicism in 2002 after having been a Methodist, and his religious devotion and commitment to helping the poor in other nations has led him in the past to break the mold of classic conservatives.

He was an early advocate of U.S. action to stop genocide in Sudan's Darfur region and visited Congo and Rwanda as a senator to decry humanitarian crises and call for better coordination in foreign aid programs.